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Jennifer Moore was raped by seven men in 1993, when she was 12 years old. Cleveland police did little to investigate the case. A month after Police Chief Michael McGrath pledged to find out why, Moore says she has waited long enough for answers and has asked the state to take up the investigation.
(Lisa DeJong, The Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A month after Cleveland Police Chief Michael McGrath pledged to personally investigate why the reported abduction and gang rape of a 12-year-old girl in 1993 never was assigned to a sex crimes detective for follow-up, the chief still has no answers.

Moore has contacted the offices of Gov. John Kasich and Attorney General Mike DeWine in recent weeks and met with a special agent from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation to request that the state assume control over the probe.

A spokeswoman for DeWine said Friday, however, that the request must come from the original jurisdiction – either the city or Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty’s Office.

McGinty has not said whether he will submit such a request.

McGrath had committed to review police’s handling of Moore’s case after former Cleveland Safety Director Carolyn Watts Allen issued an open letter, apologizing to Moore for the “trauma you experienced in 1993 both at the hands of your rapist and the hands of the Cleveland Police Department.”

McGrath had said that if he learns that police had an indefensible reason for setting the case aside, the negligence could rise to the level of criminality.

Maureen Harper, communications director for the city, said in an email last week that the investigation is ongoing.

In a recent interview, former police Lt. John Saccany, who headed up the sex crimes unit in the early 1990s, said that when he read about Moore's case in the news series, it was the first time he had heard of it. But any case involving a victim so young, he said, would have been top priority, had it been forwarded to his unit for investigation.

Mary Louise Madigan, a spokeswoman for the Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services, said Cleveland police did not report Moore's case to them as was required.

"We don't have any record of police calling us," she said.

Hospital medical personnel, who are required under Ohio law to report child abuse, did call on the case, she said. However, there was no joint investigation between the agency and police.

Madigan said there were substantial issues at that time involving communication between police and the agency. Those problems were later investigated and a new agreement was reached to prevent cases from falling through the cracks.

Moore, who agreed to be identified by name for the series, was abducted in 1993 while she walked her puppy in her East Side neighborhood. Her attackers took her behind a high school and raped her, then held her captive in a nearby house, where they continued to rape her for three days until she seized an opportunity to escape.

Moore spent the following months in a hospital psychiatric ward. She says police dismissed her story and wrote her off as a runaway. An officer visited her only once more, several years later, after she recognized one of her attackers in the neighborhood.

After that, she never heard from Cleveland police again, she said.

Her case was resurrected this year, after DNA evidence collected from Moore in the hours after the attack was tested as part of the rape kit testing initiative. The DNA profiles of seven men were identified in connection to the case. The suspects have been indicted for the attack. All of them have been convicted of felonies since 1993 — two of them having committed sex crimes.

Moore’s rape kit was one of an estimated 4,000 that sat untested in Cleveland police’s evidence room for years. More than 50 men have been indicted so far as a result of the testing initiative. At least a dozen of them are suspected serial rapists.

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